Oregon Literary Fellowship Recipients 2013 by Literary Arts

2013 Oregon Literary Fellowship Recipients

A PROGRAM OF LITERARY ARTS

An Oregon Literary Fellowship from Literary Arts feels like such an extraordinary gift. It is a very humbling and giddy experience to be lifted out of self-imposed solitude, even for an evening, and be told that yes, your work matters, yes the self-absorption is worth it, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t give up, keep writing... â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Apricot Irving, 2012 OLF recipient

At Literary Arts we spend a lot of time thinking

about writers, especially Oregon writers. We think about how, as an organization, we can best recognize, encourage, and support the work of our stateâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emerging writers. We are always working to expand the audience for Oregonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s literature, to strengthen our literary community, and to increase participation in literary activities. One way is to grant Oregon Literary Fellowships every year. Since 1988, we have awarded $700,000 in fellowships and awards to more than 500 talented Oregonians, both writers and publishers. With this support, many writers have completed works that have received Oregon Book Awards and national recognition. This year, Literary Arts received 373 applications from writers in 49 Oregon cities and towns. The judges named eight writers and two publishers to receive grants of $2,500, for a total of $25,000. The following pages tell the stories of this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s fellowship recipients. We celebrate the diversity, creativity, and promise of their work. If you would like to join us in engaging readers, supporting writers, and inspiring the next generation with great literature, please visit literary-arts.org or call 503.227.2583. We will be glad to have you along.

Oregon Literary Fellowships help Oregon

writers initiate, develop, or complete literary projects in poetry, fiction, literary nonfiction, drama, and young readers literature. The awards are merit-based. Fellowships are also awarded to support Oregonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s independent publishers and small presses. They are awarded to presses or magazines that demonstrate commitment to literary publishing. Literary Arts is currently accepting applications for the 2014 Oregon Literary Fellowships. The deadline to apply is Friday, June 28, 2013 at 5:00 p.m. Guidelines and applications are available on our site at: www.literary-arts.org/oba-home/apply/fellowships. There is no charge to apply. A writing sample is required. If you have questions about applying for an Oregon Literary Fellowship, contact Susan Denning at susan@literary-arts.org, or Mel Wells at mel@literary-arts.org. Or call our offices at 503.227.2583. Fellowship recipients are selected by out of state judges. The 2014 Oregon Literary Fellowship recipients will be announced in January, 2014.

2013 OLF Recipients Poetry

Andrea Hollander of Portland The C. Hamilton Bailey Fellowship Jessa Heath of Eugene The Oregon Poetry Community Fellowship

Fiction

Gina Ochsner of Keizer The Leslie Bradshaw Fellowship Samuel Snoek-Brown of Portland The Walt Morey Fellowship

Literary Nonfiction

Myrlin Hermes of Portland The Friends of the Lake Oswego Library William Stafford Fellowship Catherine Ryan Gregory of Eugene The Women Writers Fellowship

Drama

Eva Suter of Portland

Young Readers Literature

Patricia Bailey The Edna L. Holmes Fellowship in Young Readers Literature

Publishers

Bedoin Books of Portland Tavern Books of Portland

Publishers Bedouin Books are publishers of handmade works of

literature and poetry, fiction and nonfiction. Bedouin books’ publishing philosophy is to give emerging writers legitimate, quality collections of their work in bound form as a springboard to their careers.

Judged purely on the basis of literary merit, the little poetry book submitted by Bedouin Books, The Accidental Rarefication of Pattern #5609 by Coleman Stevenson, is head and shoulders above anything else in the applicant pool. This is real poetry, with a real voice and something original to say. Each poem is surprising, and also filled with sense and conviction; taken together, they build toward something that is larger than each alone. The book is very nicely produced, too—a pleasure to read and to hold in the hand. I would guess from their application that Bedouin Books have produced and will continue to produce many such books, since they seem to have an eye for finding fresh new talent as well as a solid ten-year track record in bringing it out. —Wendy Lesser (judge)

Tavern Books is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization that exists to print, promote, and preserve works of literary vision, to foster a climate of cultural preservation, and to disseminate books in a way that benefits the reading public. They revive out-of-print books, publish works in translation from the world’s finest poets, and maintain a catalog known as the Living Library.

George Hitchcock was a significant American poet, and Tavern Books’ little edition of his Six-Minute Poems is a lovely tribute to his life and work. The book, printed in elegant type on archival quality paper, is also a beautiful object in itself, and a perfect setting for the poems it displays. In the case of Tavern Books, its excellent list of previously published books and its plans for future publications also weighed with me. This is a press that is performing an important function in American letters, and its commitment to international writers in translation as well as undervalued American writers makes it especially remarkable in comparison to the world of commercial publishing. —Wendy Lesser (judge)

Poetry Andrea Hollander has

Q&A

published four full-length poetry collections. Honors include the Nicholas Roerich Poetry Prize, a D. H. Lawrence Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize for prose memoir, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Formerly the writer-in-residence at Lyon College for twenty-two years, she has lived in Portland since 2011.

1. What are your sources of inspiration? Because I have always been an incurable and curious observer of the way we humans interact with one another and with the ordinary circumstances and challenges that come upon us, I find poetry a place to explore such matters. 2. How would you describe your creative process? Although I do not fully understand the way a poem finally “arrives,” I come to the blank page early in the day and begin by clearing my mind as much as possible. I then give myself a craft-related “assignment” that sometimes leads me to create a poem in which I discover something important I did not know that I knew but that reveals itself in the process. Even when a worthwhile poem doesn’t result from my efforts, I consider the work I do on a failed poem or essay vital. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? The letter from Literary Arts arrived two days before I had to leave home for several months, and—already homesick to return to

Hollander Portland—I felt very much welcomed and honored by the encouragement that the fellowship provides. 4. What are you currently working on? I am simultaneously proofreading galleys for my forthcoming book, Landscape with Female Figure: New & Selected Poems, 1982– 2012, and working on new poems and a lyric essay. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? My advice to other writers, whether or not they apply for a fellowship, is always the same: Read a lot, write often, and take a promising piece through many drafts. When submitting for publication or fellowships, send only your best work.

Judge’s Comments

Andrea Hollander Budy, with artful turns and keen wit, weaves enchanting tales to disenchant us into insight. A tribute to the healing power of metaphor, her tough-minded poems find more than enough terror and beauty in the quotidian. “Finches or Sparrows” veers into a visionary instant, the knowledge of how we look at one thing to see another, a perception of perception’s metamorphic nature. The poem opens with a deceptively simple problem, as if identifying a species of bird were her true concern... But the struggle to resolve ambiguity conceals a different drama. The poem unveils layer after layer until the illusion is exposed, leaving us with ordinary leaves—and the sense that we too have been changed by this spiraling journey. “My Grandmother Taking Off My Grandfather’s Shoes” shows Budy working in the plainest style possible, compassion disguised as reportage: the poem is a feat of compression and irony, transmuting mute rage into an eloquent moral force. —Phillis Levin 9

Hollander Finches or Sparrows First the wheezing wind, and then I saw them, hundreds it seemed, yellow and brown and yellow-brown. I wondered how they knew to fly in such parallel lines and so fast and together simultaneously from the shaking hickory the wind had disturbed, straight out from the tree so fast I couldn’t tell which they were, finches or sparrows. Then the wind hesitated for a moment the way in that final bed my mother seemed to, her chest still, breath suddenly gone for a moment, but actually held in—savored, I thought later— the way her body had tried to hold me a little longer, the cord that had kept me alive now wrapped around my throat, pulling me back the way all those years later I wanted to pull her back. And now, outside, the wind wheezing again like her breath escaping from her chest. There was nothing I could do to make her keep it, those birds— finches, sparrows—moving so fast I could not tell which. Then the wheezing stopped, the wild, invisible gods released them, and I saw I had been mistaken: All at once they dropped, fluttering to the ground, nothing but leaves, yellow and brown.

—first published in The Georgia Review 63:2 (Summer 2009)

Hollander Blue I take the laundry down from the line and the line speaks to me, gray line breaking the sky in two, each half blue but one pale, the other darker than the ceramic bowl that broke this morning as I lifted it from the table after my cereal, without a hint of what would happen next. I lifted it and it just split, the dribble of milk suddenly puddling on the Formica like evidence, like white blood. I stood holding two useless halftruths in my hands, two blue half-truths bluer than your blue eyes I grew so used to looking into. The break was clean, inevitable— hidden beneath the glaze a fissure that would someday crack the bowl apart. If you were reading this now you’d say, She’s talking about us again in her usual talk-about-something-else way.

—first published in The Georgia Review 66:3 (Spring 2013)

Hollander Living Room In the cave of memory my father crawls now, his small carbide light fixed to his forehead, his kneepads so worn from the journey theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re barely useful, but he adjusts them again and again. Sometimes he arches up, stands, reaches, measures himself against the wayward height of the ceiling, which in this part of the cave is at best uneven. He often hits his head. Other times he suddenly stoops, winces, calls out a name, sometimes the pet name he had for my long-dead mother or the name he called his own. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s when my stepmother tries to call him back. Honeyman, she says, one hand on his cheek, the other his shoulder, settling him into the one chair he sometimes stays in. There are days she discovers him curled beneath the baby grand, and sheâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s learned to lie down with him. I am here, she says, her body caved against this man who every day deserts her. Bats, he says, or maybe,

Hollander field glasses. Perhaps he’s back in France, 1944, she doesn’t know. But soon he’s up again on his knees, shushing her, checking his headlamp, adjusting his kneepads, and she rises to her own knees, she doesn’t know what else to do, the two of them explorers, one whose thinning pin of light leads them, making their slow way through this room named for the living.

—first published in RUNES (Winter 2004)

Jessa Heath grew up in

Henniker, New Hampshire. Currently an MFA candidate and the Kidd Tutorial Fellow at the University of Oregon, she is the recipient of the Karen Jackson Ford Poetry Prize and an MFA scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference.

Q&A

1. What are your sources of inspiration? Reading is often the first step in a day of writing for me. Today that means Gjertrud Schnackenberg and Larry Levis. I also came back to Lolita this winter, and there’s a poem beginning for me in that. Sometimes inspiration is as simple as a striking image or phrase that takes hold and won’t let go. 2. How would you describe your creative process? Slow. I take a long time with each poem, especially in the revision process. It can be difficult to inhabit the particular music or syntax you found when you began writing a poem after you leave it alone for a while, but that distance can also be great for reading the work more objectively. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? I am pursuing my MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Oregon, and I have not submitted my work for publication while focusing on graduate school. Receiving a fellowship let me know that readers outside of my program also see promise in my writing. 14

Heath 4. What are you currently working on? I am working on a sequence about the Hudson River School artists, and Thomas Cole in particular. I’m interested in poetry that responds to visual art and also how narratives can be created out of scenes that are temporally frozen. I’ll be traveling to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts at the end of the month to conduct further research on Cole and his work. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? Seek feedback on your writing sample from other writers or readers. Their perspectives can help you identify your most polished work.

Judge’s Comments

Jessa Heath is a poet whose courage and clarity are matched by formal power and subtle music. With candor, elegance, and urgency, she gives shape to fleeting experience, the ever-changing substance of a life wherein “Some wishes are granted by the thimbleful.” In a matter of lines, Heath moves from the humble to the majestic, from a winter cabin to “The weight on the heart: inheritance.” In the stark syntax of “Palomino” she arrives at tragic understanding, deploying parallel structure to juxtapose a series of images that compose a double-portrait of the aging body—a grandmother who “pours thick molasses over oats / to mask the metallic taste of ground pills” and a horse who “buckles under her own weight / into the pasture’s late spring melt”—a fully realized lyric of remarkable mystery and mastery. In “Fence,” a deft ars poetica, she is fully at home in her craft, aware how any human creation is marked by a tension between passion and limit, and how a poem in its unfolding mimics the way of all living things. Her observations are patient and precise, her intuitions quick, so the conceit appears rooted in the poem’s ecology. —Phillis Levin 15

Heath Dent de Lion I wait for wind, for the dandelion heads to burst in the night from brilliant petal-rays to ghostly white florets, silken parachutes that will carry seeds to safety in the changing grass. I have been waiting at the edge of summer, for the morning when yellow will tip the tall grasses, for the milkweed pods to hollow, spilling from their cracked gray shells in white clouds of soft floss and dark brown seeds, each eager to be lifted by the wind across this field. I have been chasing them since spring, since the early green cucumber hulls first arrived, drooping heavily over the wooden fence,

Heath since the boy next door shredded my yellow lion manes with the throaty engine of his mower. My mother sleeps in our house by the field, cocooned in layers of blankets as the summer burns against her drawn blinds. Yesterday, she cried until she was an ocean, dripping through the floorboards and with closed eyes in our tiny kitchen, I caught her In my open mouth, salt water rain on my tongue. She dried to nothing on my skin and left me parched. I ran through the field of broken yellow blossoms, over the leaf-bite of lionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s teeth to the milkweed, desperate for their spectral change, some sign that fall would cool us. I tore open each pod to set free the fat seeds on sturdy wings, but they were still slick with milk, weighted strands not yet made for flight.

Heath Winter at My Fatherâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Cabin Last night, when the metal chimney gave way, I shined a small flashlight on the sheet metal That refused to bend to the curve of the pipe. My shoulders caught your curses as they fell, My feet stabled the ladder beneath you. I winced when your work gloves landed softly In the fresh snow and the rough wind whistled Through the twisted chimney in your hands. In the drafty cape house of my childhood You warmed soapstones by the fire And slipped them under my sheets. You would wake at the smell of the storm, Or the sound, and slide quietly from bed, Mother wrapped around the empty space Where your body should have been. I can hear the soft tamping of your boots Against stone in the mudroom, the faint rumble Of your truck engine starting in the drive. What haunts me now is your tired body Returning home from a night behind the plow, Easing open the creaking front door, How in the early morning you would rest Against the crackling stove to warm yourself And remember my toes, cold in bed above you. In the blue light of a winter morning I would wake believing stones Could hold heat through the night.

Heath But here in your cabin, the chill seeps in. We rise to a yard arrested by the freeze, Where the grass is a million ice-cut blades beneath our boots. The sun casts its glare on the glade of birches, Doubled over in brilliant crystal arches. Even the sun canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t save the pliant limbs from this thick cold. Their fragile spines glass, glass, all turned to glassâ&#x20AC;&#x201D; Unyielding pines splinter under ice-weight And splay their arms over the power lines, Bending them in deep bows that nearly reach the snow.

Fiction Gina Ochsner is the author of the

Q&A

short story collection The Necessary Grace to Fall, which received the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, and the story collection People I Wanted to Be. Both books won an Oregon Book Award. Her novel The Russian Dreambook of Colour and Flight was long-listed for the Orange Award and was an Oregon Book Award finalist. She teaches in Seattle Pacific University's creative writing MFA program.

1. What are your sources of inspiration? A great source of inspiration is other writers. I’m intrigued, delighted, enchanted by what so many others are doing. I love the work of Angela Carter, Melissa Pritchard, Kelly Link, Ingrid Hill, Pinckney Benedict, Chris Adrian, Kevin Brockmeier, Bohumil Hrabal and many, many others. When I read the work of these writers I can’t help but sense that they are having FUN and that’s such an inspiration. I think fun is what drives my desire to write. 2. How would you describe your creative process? My process is erratic, sloppy and mosaic-like. I gather objects, slips of paper, leaves of trees, bark and tack them by means of paper clips, gum or anything else slightly adhesive, to story boards. I’m looking for images that will become slow-burning fuel for stories. People say and do the most amazing things and so it’s not unusual for me to scribble down a word, a phrase I’ve heard, and a quick composite of character. I’m looking for combustible sources of conflict. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? When I opened the letter from Literary Arts I scanned it quickly, looking for the words “regretfully” or “however” or “unfortunately” the signal 20

Ochsner words for “no.” Writers learn to do this, I think, because if we’re sending our work out, we hear “no” a lot. So this letter was a huge YES that said “we believe in you” and every writer needs to hear that at least once in his or her writing career. 4. What are you currently working on? Currently I’m working on a longish novel set in Eastern Latvia. Eels, outdoor latrines, and mishaps with pianos and dirigibles figure prominently at this point. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? Never give up. That’s the best advice I’ve received and it’s the best advice I know to give. So I’ll say it again: never give up.

Judge’s Comments

How marvelous that this manuscript contains this line of dialogue: “There’s no power in story. Words don’t make things happen.” It is a marvelous act of authorial empathy, as well, that this sentiment— which contravenes what we as artists and writers know to be true, contradicts our everyday experience, in which stories are often the only entities with actual power—is expressed, not by an unsympathetic character, not by an antagonist, but by someone whom the writer and the story take very seriously, for whom they both express great sympathy and affection. Only a daring artist, and a confident one, will allow a compassionate character to express in considered terms an entirely plausible doubt about the efficacy of art: express it in the very act of disproving it! The story, in a most crafty way, becomes its own subject matter and its own best argument for the value of stories, even while it testifies to the substantial danger of their allure. Happily, it’s no mere metafictional caprice: it is populated by entirely real and fully-realized people who dwell in a word made tangible through the generous use of diamond-hard detail. A complete work of narrative art, satisfying at every level. —Pinckney Benedict 21

Ochsner Chapter One (excerpt from novel-in-progress)

In August of 1991, the unthinkable happened: the bear lost its teeth. The Soviet Union officially collapsed. Like most other Latvians living in the east, our family teetered between elation and shock. I was fifteen at the time and all this meant to me was at last we wouldn’t have to watch boring Soviet documentaries at school #2 and that my older brother, Rudolphs, who was seventeen, wouldn’t get called up into the Soviet Army. It meant that Father, who cared for the town cemetery and was paid very little by the government, would get a new boss and maybe a raise. Certainly he deserved one. In the months preceding the breakup of the Soviet Union, we’d seen quite a number of extraordinary and extravagant murders, accidental deaths and suicides. In the spring of 1991, a poet from Lubana awoke from a dream in which she was a wolf, bit her husband’s neck, and killed him in the bed they shared. Three months later, a saxophonist in a Klezmer band went crazy and killed his fellow band members—all seven of them—and then beat himself to death with the saxophone. Three months after that, after swimming in the nude in the newly thawed Aiviekste River, a civil engineer built himself a flying machine and died after falling from a great height. His grieving widow, not wishing her husband’s efforts to go unnoted, gave lectures about the dangers of gravity for several months at a university in Daugavpils. Then she succumbed to a mysterious urge to throw herself in front of the Daugavpils-Minsk train and was pulped on the tracks. As if regulated by an invisible clock, all these events took place exactly three months apart from each other. And all of these events were carried out by members of an émigré community

Ochsner of Russians and Russian-speaking Jews. Whenever these things happened, Father, naturally, was one of the first to hear about it. Very few people in town had telephone service, but one luxury of Father’s trade, courtesy of the municipal government, was this black phone mounted on the kitchen wall. When it rang, Father knew it meant he was needed to go dig another hole. Mother, who admired progress and kitchen gadgetry as much as the next woman, hated this phone, which had been installed, she said, only to deliver bad news. “And who makes all this bad news?” Mother asked as we crowded at the front door to watch the approach of the coffin of a young copyeditor who had been in possession of frayed nerves and a rope strong enough to hang herself with. “Foreigners!” Mother answered her own question. About this time in my in my life I fancied myself a sort of junior sleuth, a girl-detective, a genius-in-the making. If I were a genius, as Mother had so hoped I would be, then I would be able to coax meaning out of these bizarre events overwhelming our region. For instance, why, on the first day of school, three weeks after Latvia declared its sovereign independence, did our history teacher, hump-backed Mr. Ignats, open the windows of our classroom and throw out half of the red and grey history books? Only half. The remaining books he stowed in a wardrobe at the back of the room. And what should we make of the Canadians and Australians arriving in droves, deeds and titles in hand, to claim old ancestral properties? And why were so many young people gathering late at night at the kafenica, drinking and singing, their voices over-loud and straining. A slow bloomer, in Mother’s words, I was just now at age fifteen “budding.” I had small boobs that now itched all the time.

Ochsner “Stop that,” Mother said when she saw me scratching at my chest. And the acne on my face, it itched too. I did not like looking in the small square mirror next to our door. I hated my body. I sensed it would disappoint me in a regular sort of way and this, too, was a mystery I knew I would never fully understand. And so I turned my sleuthing to middle ground: our family. Why Father didn’t discuss his parents. Why he considered his giltedged Bible so sacred that he wore thin cotton gloves when he wanted to read it. What to make of the old songs, the dainas, that Mother and Father sang from time to time, but whose meaning they never explained to Rudy and me. And what did Mother mean when she whispered of “necessary sacrifices of ancestral inheritances” to Father? I suppose I needed to feel that the strangeness within and without had meaning. That discernible patterns existed and that if I were smart enough, I would find them, and crack the code. I would understand how to interpret the strangeness of our lives, I would understand then how to live.This of course, is what makes a genius a genius, and being a genius I knew, was the secret code-cracking ingredient that would earn Mother’s unconditional love. But all this I knew, would take work. Clues don’t just pop like mushrooms after a June sprinkle. You have to root them out. This was the only justification I could manufacture to excuse my obvious and deliberate trespass: I had slithered under Mother’s bed to rifle in her box of letters marked PERSONAL AND PRIVATE. I suspected that some of the letters belonged to Grandmother Velta. I’d only managed to tuck one of them under my waistband when I felt a nudge, none to gently, on my backside. “What are you doing under there?” Mother, a broom in one hand, dustpan in the other, sniffed at the air. Is that dust? Her

Ochsner twitching nose seemed to say, while her hand gripped the broom in readiness. “Nothing,” I said, pushing the box deeper into the dark recesses. I wriggled from under the solid wooden box frame. For a moment Mother looked disappointed: a zealous housekeeper who took joy in subduing tufts of debris, I believe she thought I was, at last,demonstrating a passion she could recognize and endorse. Then her brows lowered. “Hurry. There’s another funeral.” The funeral procession was like the others: a cluster of women who followed the coffin were dressed from head to toe in black. Behind them were the men in their black hats, which Rudy once told me in confidential tones were called Schwartze Nipples. Apparently the coffin, a pine box with a domed lid and handles all around, was heavy because every ten paces or so the pallbearers stopped and set the casket on the road to rest for a few seconds. “Who is it this time?” Rudy asked. Mother shook her head. “Such drama. Why can’t foreigners die quietly like the rest of us?” Father, in his good suit, joined us at the door. It was a Jewish procession. Technically not foreign, but Father didn’t like to argue with Mother. At least not in the presence of death. Once the mourners passed we followed them to the burial site, where we stood at a distance from the grave beneath the bare alders. We were there to show our condolences and also because it was Father’s job to make sure the gate was closed tight for the evening after everyone left. He checked the gates at midnight and again at three each morning to quell the stories that at night Jews were removing their dead from the cemetery. cont.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

Q&A

teaches writing in Portland, Oregon. He also works as production editor for Jersey Devil Press for Unshod Quills. His fiction has appeared in Ampersand Review, Bartleby Snopes, Fiction Circus, and others. Excerpts from his novel Hagridden appeared in Sententia and will appear in SOL: English Writing in Mexico.

1. What are your sources of inspiration? Other stories. I mostly mean the stories I overhear people telling in coffee shops, the stories I hear in songs, the stories beyond the frame of a photograph, the stories I think *aren’t* getting told in films. I love interacting with other work like that. It makes me feel like part of a bigger artistic picture. 2. How would you describe your creative process? A few years ago, I had the opportunity to write full-time, which meant I had the opportunity to establish my writing habits, or what a lot of writers call “butt-in-the-chair time.” It isn’t necessarily about routine, but it is about the discipline of the writing. When you have the time to write, writing is what you do—you don’t waste that. Developing that kind of discipline transformed my writing. Now that my work schedule has become less predictable, I have to fit my writing in where I can, but I haven’t forgotten the importance of sitting down and putting in the hours. The important thing is that, when I have the time—and sometimes I have to make the time—I shut everything down, put on some music, and I get to work.

Snoek-Brown 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? The book that led to this fellowship is set in Louisiana during the Civil War. I grew up visiting family in the region where my novel is set, and I’ve been a fan of all things Civil War since I was ten. But it’s been a long time since I last visited a Civil War battlefield or wandered around the Louisiana bayou. This fellowship is affording me the chance to visit that region, to walk around inside the world of my own fiction. I can’t imagine a more exciting way to finish this novel. 4. What are you currently working on? Mostly I’m focusing on wrapping up the Civil War novel. But meanwhile, I’ve written most of a first draft of an apocalyptic story cycle, a collection of all these small, intimate lives desperately trying to ride out the end of the world and make their homes inside the chaos. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? First, believe in yourself. I took a long time working on my application for the fellowship because I kept second-guessing my work. I am so grateful that I didn’t give in to that second-guessing, and that my wife encouraged me to apply. And secondly, remember that this is a fellowship, in the truest sense of the word, and just applying for it can help you feel a part of Oregon’s rich and supportive literary community. Before you apply, while you’re applying, and definitely after you’ve applied, participate in that community! Go to readings, buy books, and support Literary Arts. It will change your life.

Judge’s Comments

Hagridden will be a page-turner for sure (in the best possible way: smart and exciting, and satisfying without becoming cloying in the manner of novels that are written to pander to the patiencechallenged reader), if the promise of this brilliant excerpt is borne out in the manuscript at full length, which I strongly believe cont.

Snoek-Brown that it will be. These women remind me of the peasant characters from Japanese samurai films who would plunder the warriors who had fled the battlefield or were too wounded to leave it; but they are also utterly grounded in their own highly particular time and place. Thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the hallmark of a powerfully imagined fictional universe: that it is entirely itself, and sufficient to its own purposes, even as it calls to mind other places, other times, other grand narratives. The pages that we have available to us also promise a novel thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s ambitious in its scope (the inclusion of the rougarou material seems to me particularly inspired) and in its understanding of war: its ferocity, its relentlessness, its often exhilarating intensity, and (ultimately) its futility. I am most eager to read the final work! â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Pinckney Benedict

Snoek-Brown Hagridden (excerpt)

The wind picked up, some squall brewing out in the Gulf, and it woke the old woman already distressed from dreams of her son returned from the war faceless and without wits, just a dumb smear of blood where once his features had been. She reached across the pallet to find the girl missing, and without thought she leapt from the pallet and ran toward the hut door, but upon opening it she beheld the dark red face of a wolf, huge crimson shoulders hunched behind and the hulking mass of a man-sized beast emerging through the rushes. Flash of bone-white teeth in the starlight. The creature paused and swayed on light forelimbs as though wrought solely of pent-up energy, and a low rumble near to laughter rolled up from deep in its throat. Then it charged her and she screamed and fled back into the hut. She dove to the floor and tore through their stores hunting the first weapon she could find, but the creature burst in after her and grabbed her about the waist and hauled her away from the stockpile, threw her meatily to the floor by the door. She scrambled and tried to dodge around the rougarou, still after a weapon, so it hit her hard in the face and then reached and grabbed one ankle, dragged her scrabbling out of the hut and flung her across the yard. She rolled to a crouch and made to run but the beast seemed precognizant of all her thoughts and moved with her, circling with its arms and legs wide to snatch her from her flight, cutting off her every escape. And it spoke. “Settle down, now, I ain’t what you think I am.” The woman’s eyes went wide and her face contorted and she began to holler. “Oh Christ, it speaks with the tongue of man, Lord save us!”

Snoek-Brown The rougarou lunged and tackled her and smothered her mouth with one hand and he bent to growl at her. “Stop your hollering, you’ll raise the whole of Louisiana.” The woman’s eyes were frenzied and rolling in her head like the eyes of a wild pig caught one leg in a trap and seeing the hunter’s approach. The rougarou leaned in and hissed at her the more. “It ain’t you I’m after. I’m after that man your girl sees.” The woman moaned through his hand and muffled came her voice, “I told her, I told her you’d come. Dear God save us all.” The rougarou relaxed his fingers, raised his palm away from her lips. “Where is he, this man she sees?” The woman was gasping like a landed fish, twitching under him, her head rolling as though with it alone she might wriggle from his grasp. But she answered him as she writhed. “He out in the marsh.” “Take me to him.” “I can’t, I can’t let you have her.” “I ain’t after her neither, I just want the man.” The woman settled and looked at him, first sidelong as though looking at the sun and wary of staring directly into it, but as she calmed she noticed the canine face above her was stiff and dead-looking, the hot breath on her neck the breath of a man. The eyes buried back in the sockets human eyes, and the head just a mask. She nodded at the man and he nodded back and eased from off her, let her up. She rolled to her knees and huffed on the ground, regaining the breath her exertions and the man’s weight had crushed from her, and she searched the marsh, then she raised one arm like a hunting dog and pointed frantically out away from herself.

Snoek-Brown “He up the bayou, just take that there path and keep north and you bound to find him.” The rougarou shook his masked head. “Show me,” he said. The woman shook her own head back. “Nosir, I show you myself you just kill us all, me and my girl included.” “What purpose would your death serve to me? I ain’t interested in the likes of you or yours.” “I don’t trust no devil,” the woman said. She stood and brushed her knees and faced him. “I done showed you the way, you can find it your ownself.” She looked off into the marsh to guide his gaze and then she broke into another dash to pass him but he cut her off swift as the night breeze itself, this time with a blade to her throat. She saw it as it flashed before her, recognized the Bowie of the stranger in the road. She made to touch her throat where he’d cut her but didn’t want to let on she’d recognized him, so instead she put the pads of her fingers to the blade and pressed gently against it, tried to hold it away from herself. “Alright, alright,” she said. “I take you in.”

Literary Nonfiction Merlin Hermes is the author

of The Lunatic the Lover and the Poet and Careful What You Wish For. A graduate of Reed College and the University of London, she was raised in Hawaii and currently lives in Portland, Oregon.

Q&A

1. What are your sources of inspiration? There are a handful of short high-concept poems or stories, as well as a few other creative artistic projects I’ve done, that I can point to as the result of “inspiration”: a ticklish idea like a bolt from above, which becomes an obsession that must be manifested in a manic fury. But it is by nature unpredictable, and a difficult energy to sustain over a long-form project. In writing a novel, I think inspiration is less important than momentum: remaining committed to a journey that (compared to reading, at least) can be a painstakingly slow and tedious slog through a story. I like writing humorous fiction, because if I can make myself laugh with a funny or clever line, it keeps me entertained while I’m writing as well as (hopefully) entertaining the reader as well. 2. How would you describe your creative process? Writing, for me, is much like trying to remember a vivid and complicated dream. You can see and understand the entire scene in a flash, but it gets slippery when you try to pin down the details. I write quite slowly—perhaps five hundred or a thousand words a day—partly because I don’t write a narrative through from beginning to end, but

Hermes work on the entire chapter like a jigsaw puzzle, completing a paragraph here and a line or two of dialogue there, and figuring out how the pieces all fit together. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? A memoir feels in some ways like an almost presumptuous undertaking. Fiction writers are praised for deftly capturing the details of everyday life and ordinary people; but to announce that you are writing a memoir almost inevitably invites raised eyebrows, the question implied: Just what exactly is so interesting about you, anyway? Receiving this fellowship helps to quiet those doubts. I feel now like I have not only a right to tell my story, but an obligation to Literary Arts and the judges who chose my project as worthy of support, to attempt it to the best of my ability. 4. What are you currently working on? I’m just now seeing the end in sight of a doorstopper of a novel I’ve been working on for several years: a darkly comic historical satire about the 17th century playwright, spy, and proto-feminist rabblerouser Aphra Behn. 5. What advice do you have for future fellowship applicants? I think it helped that I tried to tell a story in the application essay, confessing to the setbacks in my writing career and explaining how I overcame them, instead of simply restating those moments of triumph listed on my CV. Don’t be afraid to show emotion and personality, including gratitude for the opportunities you’ve been given in the past. And it never hurts to have a sense of humor.

Judge’s Comments “Many Hats,” the excerpt from Myrlin Hermes’ memoir about her life with her unconventional parents, has the emotional precision and consistency of voice found in the award-winning nonfiction of Tobias

Hermes Wolff. Hermes’ story comes from a youthful narrator who recounts with lyricism and honesty the story of the fairytale father, both larger than life and less than he should be. Hermes’ tale could be “This Girl’s Life,” a narrative in which we see the adult world through the clear-eyed innocence and tough-minded sincerity of the child. In Hermes’ other excerpt, “Red Ribbon Cake,” she brings to life another extraordinary character in her Uncle Herb, and in her dramatization of him, she suggests that her memoir will portray, with respect and candor, individuals not eccentrics. —Michael Pearson

Many Hats (excerpt) This is how you make a Yellow Brick Road: out of yellow bricks. This is how you make a brick: take an ordinary kitchen sponge, and dip it in the tray of yellow paint. Press it to the floor— gently, or else you’ll lose the stippled texture of the sponge, which makes it look like brickwork. Leave a finger’s width and then lay down another, staggering the layers up the path masked out in tape. It is ten pm. I am nine years old. I am on my hands and knees, working backwards, brick by brick by brick. Sunshine pours down, surprisingly liquid, from the ten-gallon can with its name on the label on its side. Judging by eye, my father adds Fool’s Gold, which looks glutinous and dark in its clear plastic jug, but contains bits of glittering mica to give it sparkle. He stirs these together with a stick, then tips the bucket into the shallow tray. The road spirals outward from center stage in three directions: Up Left and Up Right into the wings, and down the

Hermes aisle, through the house, and out the exit door. On the backdrop, it continues: a narrow golden thread winding through woods and checkered fields, gradually uphill (“Cities are always built on hills,” my father explains) where, vanishing into the farthest distance, faintly visible through a spatter of blue-white haze, stands an emerald spire. My father follows me, a fine-tipped brush clutched in each hand, one dipped in black paint and the other white. Each brick gets one thin bright edge and one shadowed, to make it pop into three dimensions under lights. Every so often, he will stop to adjust the angles on one or the other of the oscillating fans. The fans are not there for our comfort, but to dry the paint before tomorrow’s rehearsal—but still, the breeze feels good on the humid August night. It is hotter here in Pu’unene than at my mother’s house Upcountry, near the crater. Pu’unene means “goose hill,” but I’ve never seen a goose here, nor a hill. It is the valley land between the slopes of Haleakala and the West Maui Mountains, dusty and dry, choked with foul brown smoke when they burn the cane for harvesting. The theatre used to be a warehouse owned by the sugarcane factory next door. Jet planes flying in tourists from the Mainland or Japan still use the smokestacks of the factory as a landmark to guide them into the airport in Kahului. The rule for when a plane flies over during a performance is pro-JECT! This is my third year acting at the Maui Youth Theatre, where my father designs and builds the sets. I am a Munchkin, like all the eight-to ten-year-olds. I have been Thumbelina and an Oompa Loompa, and the girl who told the Emperor he had no clothes. I have made forests of flats and spattered drops with gallons of pale blue sky. One late night during the run of Peter

Hermes Pan, my father rigged me up in the elastic harness, and, working a great pair of pulleys from the wings, taught me how it feels to fly. It hurts. For Christmas, he gave me a brown leather case, about eighteen inches square, with a latch that opened with a little brass key. Inside was a tall black silk top hat, which fit nearly perfectly. It looked just like the hat that had brought Frosty the Snowman to life. “Is it magic?” I breathed. “Now c’mon,” he chided. He folded his arms across his chest and jutted out his chin. “Would I give you something that wasn’t?” He showed me how the crown twisted together and collapsed into a flat silk disc (“for the Opera”), then popped open again at the touch of a hidden catch in the brim. Sunday morning, we go to the Swap Meet, where my father sells his silk-screened T-shirts, crystals, magic wands. The wands he makes himself, from lengths of copper piping wrapped in strips of sueded hide, decorated with feathers or beads of semiprecious stones, tipped in spears of quartz. You can buy a stand as well, with a tiny flashlight inside, so when you put in a battery, the wand glows from within, and all the flaws in the stone sparkle with rainbows. When I was in kindergarten, the teacher had a wooden wand with a paper star glued to the end. She spun around the circle, and when she pointed the magic wand, we each had to tell her something. Today, it was something about our fathers, and at my turn, I proudly announced my father was an alchemist. She frowned, and her honey-colored eyes searched for the word I’d meant to use instead. “An…?” I felt my cheeks grow hot. “It’s like…a wizard?”

Hermes “Your father is a…wizard?” she repeated blankly. Two or three of the kids in the circle had started to giggle. I searched the stores of my memory for something else my father had told me about himself. “He’s a seventh son of a seventh son.” The teacher’s face fell open in relief. “Wow, that’s a very large family,” she informed the class, then turned her smiling mouth to me. “You must have a lot of cousins.” When I told my dad about this, he cracked up. “Noblesse oblige, darlin’” he chuckled. “Noblesse oblige.” “What does that mean?” I asked suspiciously. “Nobility obligates,” he translated, which didn’t help at all. “It means you will encounter people like that all your life. Most people in the world are like that. Try to be kind to them.” He grinned, shaking his head. “Remember, in the valley of the blind, the one-eyed man is crazy.”

Catherine Ryan Gregory

Q&A

recently earned her master’s in literary nonfiction from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. She is now working on turning her master’s final project, about women in Ghana exiled to a witchcamp, into a book. She lives and freelances in Portland.

1. What are your sources of inspiration? I am most inspired by the people I meet as we all go about our business. Average people doing extraordinary things make me want to share their stories. 2. How would you describe your creative process? I know I’ve hit upon a great idea if I can’t stop telling people about it. “Did you know people still persecute witches?” I’ll begin, or, “So there’s this farmer who loves his pigs so much he sings to them and feeds them donuts.” The next, and my favorite, part of the writing process is the reporting. I get to immerse myself in another world and follow my curiosity—this is when possibilities seem endless because I’m still learning the story. The next bit is the most frustrating. Shaping a narrative from so much information can feel like taking apart a complex piece of furniture, looking at all the pieces, and reassembling them into a more compact and manageable armoire, only you don’t get blueprints or instructions....Even editing can be an exciting challenge to find a more original or engaging way to say something or set a scene. Lastly, of course, is publication. Who doesn’t like to see her name in print? Beyond the ego, though, knowing that others are reading what I’ve crafted is gratifying and makes me want to delve into another project immediately. 38

Gregory 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? The moment I learned I received a Literary Arts fellowship, my mind jumped to the work it will enable me to do. Recognition from an eminent literary organization and accomplished judges is mind-blowing, of course, but I’m most excited about the additional reporting the fellowship will allow me to do. 4. What are you currently working on? I’m working on turning my master’s final project into a book. While in Ghana two years ago, I learned about women who were cast out from their communities under suspicion of witchcraft. Since then, I have been reporting and writing about these women. Their experiences shed light on what it’s like to be female in rural Ghana as well as the staggering resilience of humankind. What most impressed me about the women I met—many of whom are grandmothers—is that, for perhaps the first time in their lives, they now exercise a certain amount of autonomy in their daily activities. The irony in this—that after being exiled and labeled witches and even beaten, they enjoy more freedom than before—is a compelling story and one that belies a simplistic narrative of victimization. I plan to return to Ghana this fall to return to the witch camp and follow up with the ninety or so women I met on my previous trip. 5. What advice do you have for future fellowship applicants? The only advice I have for future applications is to follow your passion. That’s what I’ve done, partly because my life seems more drab when I take a detour, but it seems to have worked. Let that enthusiasm show. It’s contagious.

Judge’s Comments

The excerpt from Catherine Gregory’s manuscript about the lives of women in the Gushegu witch camp in Ghana is literary journalism at its finest. With discretion, intelligence, and precision, Gregory does what this sort of nonfiction should—simultaneously 39

Gregory show and tell. In an unadorned prose and with subtle skill, she braids history, personal stories, sociology, and current events into a narrative that is at once timely and timeless. —Michael Pearson

Excerpt The almost-full moon is so bright it casts a shadow, and the imams in the nearby town have not yet broadcast their first call to prayer, but the day’s activity has already begun. The roosters have been crowing for hours, and the rhythmic thwok thwok of wood on wood marks time for the women pounding maize for the day’s meals. The air is cool, but not for long. In a few hours, the heat will bake the hard earth even harder, and the equatorial sun will shine the world into seeming flat, bleached and dreamlike. Nloga Wakpan steps into the pre-dawn to fill a pot with water from an earthen cistern. She stoops to reenter her hut, steps over the shin-high threshold built to keep out the wet season’s rains and lights a fire opposite the entrance. The dry pieces of straw catch quickly. No window provides an escape for the smoke, and the round hut is soon hazy. The grass ceiling is black with ash from thousands of fires. Wakpan is used to the smoke, and she lies back down on a plastic woven mat as her bath water heats. She pulls a piece of cloth over herself and warms her feet by the blaze. Outside, women in their forties, fifties and sixties are bathing, cooking breakfast and washing clothes. Some move haltingly as their joints and old injuries protest. Others walk with

Gregory their torsos pitched slightly forward, bent from a lifetime of folding at the waist to cook on ground-level stoves. Gradually, the shadows cloaking the grass-roof huts and brightly painted buildings lift. Birds in the bush call to each other. The roosters become braver, pinning the slower hens in the dirt for a few thrusting seconds. There are no men or children in sight. The sun finally reaches over the corrugated roof of the eastern building, and rich saturated light spills onto the thatched roof of Wakpan’s hut, which stands in the center of the courtyard. Wrinkled women approach Wakpan’s hut singly and in small groups. “Dasuba,” they say, drawing out the last a and bowing their heads, as they step into the hut. “Good morning.” “Naa,” Wakpan answers, bobbing her closely shorn head in response. She pushes herself up to a seated position. A handful of women sit on the mat opposite her. They fold their legs and seem to be all sharp angles: bony elbows and dusty knees and skinny limbs. There is barely enough space in the hut for an adult to stretch out lengthwise, and shoulder-high stacks of bowls, pots and sacks of grain threaten to topple. Wakpan asks her peers how they slept, the question that begins every morning. The conversation lilts up and down in their musical Kokomba, interrupted by “Dasuba” and “Naa” every time someone new arrives. Some bring warm touzafe, a thick millet porridge, for Wakpan to sample. Each woman leaves after a few minutes, freeing space for the others who have arrived to pay their respects. Nloga Wakpan acts as the magazia, a leader or female chief figure, of about 90 women in Northern Ghana. The camp—a collection of traditional mud huts and concrete rooms painted in salmon, sky blue and mint green—lies a few kilometers’ worth of

Gregory rutted, dusty roads outside the town of Gushegu. The women, most of whom have raised children and grandchildren, now live beyond the oversight of husbands or families. According to the people in their home villages, they are witches. Ghana’s Northern Region, an area about the size of Virginia and home to two million people, contains six so-called witch camps, including this one near Gushegu. The Ghanaian government doesn’t keep close tabs on the camps, but estimates of the number of men, women and children living in the camps ranges from 1,700 to 5,000. The overwhelming majority of camp inhabitants are elderly women. The Ghanaian understanding of a witch differs from the Western archetype, and specifics vary among ethnic groups. Typically, though, a witch is someone who can project her spirit outside her body to inflict harm on others. She allies herself with other witches in a secret coven. Many groups believe that witches eat, or “chop,” their victims in the astral realm, causing pain, illness and eventually death in the physical world. Women are much more likely to be witches; men, on the other hand, are thought to use supernatural power for good. Men and women both routinely visit such leaders for medicine, charms and spiritual protection. The women living in the Gushegu witch camp do not enjoy such acclaim. They have been buffeted by circumstance: They woke up one day and found they were undesirable. As soon as they were labeled witches, people they had lived beside for years turned on them. They fled, or they were shipped off, to a place far from their families and communities.

Gregory Uncertainty continues at the camp. Getting enough to eat and acquiring water is never guaranteed. They receive handouts from charities, or they don’t. They get work harvesting grain or painting a house, or they don’t. They get visits from family, or they don’t. Chance, and other people more powerful than they, dictate their existence. The women in the Gushegu witch camp manage the best they can.

Drama Eva Suter writes and/or directs projects

Q&A

for the Working Theatre Collective, where she directed 20 Erotic Shorts and wrote a trilogy of plays about unfortunate Greek women. She was awarded a Portland Drammy for her play Medusa. Eva’s works have been produced at places such as Bellingham, Washington’s Idiom Theatre and Northwest Playwright’s Alliance.

1. What are your sources of inspiration? A lot of things. Bits of new articles. Stories I heard once at a party or from when I was a kid. Movies I don’t remember seeing. Sometimes a voice starts talking to you, and you just have to listen and find out who/what they are. 2. How would you describe your creative process? One part feeling awesome and guided by a glowing light. Fifteen parts banging one’s head on an unseen wall. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? Knowing exactly what it goes to. Exactly which project. The excitement of the permission to focus on just that, if only for a time. 4. What are you currently working on? A play about family and the orbits of celestial bodies. A collaborative piece about the death of shopping malls. A series of fairytale-ish poems about a fictionalized version of a city I used to live in. A short play about action movies. Something about alleys. Other things. Grad school. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? Apply. Just do. And do it again. There are precisely zero reasons not to. 44

Suter Judge’s Comments

Eva Suter’s play Medusa is a contemporary retelling of the Medusa myth. Like some of the work of Luis Alfaro (Oedipus El Rey, Electricidad, Bruja), Suter’s poetic drama flips the classical Greek myth into a recognizable modern setting both to make the mythology very human and the mundane mythic. Suter’s present-day Medusa is a young shopgirl who meets Poseidon in a casual way; the agora—the central marketplace of ancient Greece—is reframed as a suburban mall, and the one-named mythic monster may in our age be some version of the one-named celebrity—Cher, Madonna… The young Gorgon starts out her life as ordinary—we are told she is born into a family of monsters…but the play interrogates that idea—who is a monster? “Ten fingers, ten toes?” Displaying an original lyrical voice, Suter uses the Chorus both to comment on the action and to participate in the story; the Chorus, speaking with a contemporary sensibility, has a haunting effect: Medusa takes the bus to work pulls her long silver hair back into a pony tail it’s a hot day, the bus smells damp with the sweat of strangers. Someday she’ll be beyond this someday, soon her name in bright lights soon soon soon. Eva Suter is a gifted young dramatist, with a poetic, compelling voice. I hope the fellowship encourages her growth and development as a playwright. —Brian Freeman

Suter Medusa (excerpt) CHORUS 2 Just then she sees him. Him, the man, it’s been months. Time has passed, but it’s him, she knows it. Filing awkwardly through a rack of dresses. He looks smaller somehow. Milder. At this proximity.

CUSTOMER Maybe in green? MEDUSA Sure, it’s... CUSTOMER In green MEDUSA It’s... CUSTOMER I’m sorry. MEDUSA No, I am sorry. Size six? CUSTOMER Four. MEDUSA Six. CUSTOMER Fine

Suter MEDUSA Here, they can ring you out up at the counter. CHORUS 2 She doesn’t know what to do. She stands, a shade frozen, before making a decision. MEDUSA Afternoon, sir, can I help you with anything? POSEIDON Oh, I...I’m just looking. MEDUSA Sure POSEIDON Not for me. MEDUSA Of course not. POSEIDON For my daughter MEDUSA Of course. POSEIDON Of course, I mean, none of this is quite my color. MEDUSA I don’t know, I think this one would be a good look.

Suter POSEIDON A little revealing. MEDUSA These days, one must be bold. POSEIDON I suppose. MEDUSA Yes. POSEIDON Yes. MEDUSA I’m sorry. You’re looking for your daughter? Something for your daughter? POSEIDON Mostly. MEDUSA How old is she? POSEIDON How old are you? MEDUSA Old enough. POSEIDON Well enough. My daughter, is a junior this year. She’s invited to prom. I thought I might surprise her. Her grades have been good.

Suter MEDUSA Don’t. POSEIDON What? MEDUSA Don’t buy a dress. POSEIDON Why? MEDUSA She’ll hate it, whatever it is. These girls, I know them, they need to find it for themselves. Buy a gift card. POSEIDON A card? MEDUSA A gift card. POSEIDON Aha. MEDUSA Then you can gift and she can get what she wants. Everybody’s happy. POSEIDON You work for commission? MEDUSA Who doesn’t?

Suter POSEIDON I meant no— MEDUSA It’s fine, if you want to buy something...Otherwise, I need to help other customers. POSEIDON A card, a gift card. I’ll take one. MEDUSA I’ll help you at the counter. I recognize you, from somewhere. POSEIDON I get that a lot. I look like someone. MEDUSA No. I’ve seen you. Around. POSEIDON It’s a small town. MEDUSA Not that small. POSEIDON Small enough, eh? Poseidon. MEDUSA What? POSEIDON That’s my name. Poseidon, what’s yours?

Suter MEDUSA Medusa. POSEIDON Now we’ve met. How’s that? MEDUSA Do you ever go to that park? near the hospital, just off the old freeway, with the big field and the overlook of the river? You know that one? POSEIDON I can’t say. MEDUSA I saw you. POSEIDON You did? MEDUSA I did. POSEIDON You did. MEDUSA How old do you think I am? POSEIDON I know better than that, I have a— cont.

Young Readers Literature Patricia Bailey lives in Klamath

Falls, where she spends most of her time watching people, making up conversations, and scribbling on sticky notes. She was a 2011 Fishtrap Fellow.

Q&A

1. What are your sources of inspiration? Books are my go-to source of inspiration. I have a handful of writers/ books who never fail to amaze and inspire (Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak, Wintergirls, Chains) Sherman Alexie (everything, but his YA stuff kills), Rosanne Parry (Heart of a Shepherd). They all have the same thing in common. I read their work. I’m awestruck at how darn good they are. And, somehow, I feel like writing is still possible. I also check in with the books/writers that helped grow me up (Beverly Cleary, Judy Blume). They remind me how it feels to be a kid and how necessary writing is in the world. 2. How would you describe your creative process? Too many showers. Long hikes. Lots of time spent bouncing on my exercise ball/desk chair, and finally, hopefully, a rush of words that convey something real. Typically, I get a character’s voice first. Then comes the work of piecing together the elements into a full-on story. 3. What is most exciting about receiving a fellowship? Just being recognized—and recognized by such an organization. Writing can get pretty lonely—and sometimes it feels you’re talking to yourself. It’s exciting to know that what I’m working on resonates somewhere outside my own head. Plus the list of folks who have 52

Bailey received a Literary Arts Fellowship is pretty impressive. It’s humbling to be in that kind of company, and it inspires a fair amount of hope. Of course it was pretty amazing that someone would actually write a check based on something I wrote. I’m still wrapping my head around that. 4. What are you currently working on? I am (fingers crossed) finishing up a historical middle-grade novel set in a turn of the century gold mining boomtown, and playing with the beginnings of a contemporary YA novel. 5. What advice do you have for future applicants? Apply. Apply. Apply. I didn’t think I had any chance of getting such an award. I applied because I figured that’s what writers do. They send their stuff out into the world. And when the world is good, it sends stuff back.

Judge’s Comments Lined With Gold is a compelling historical fiction set in the early 20th century when the dream of finding gold and instant riches drove many to move West. Ms. Bailey has mined this historical period for setting and characters that draw us right into her story. The tale is told through the diary entries of a thirteen-year-old girl, Kit Donavan. It is filled with heartaches and harsh events, losses and hopes, and survival over greed and brutality. This poor minor girl writes her dayto-day observations and struggles in rich sensory details and deftly weaves in intrigue and suspense. The characters are real and earthy, the stakes are high, and fear and distrust run deep. What anchors this story is Kit’s voice. Laced with irony, humor, sadness, persistence, and determination, it is powerful and inviting. It will resonate with readers long after the words are read. —Kashmira Sheth

Bailey The Goldfield Diaries: The (Mostly True) Adventures of Kit Donovan (excerpt) Goldfield, Nevada – February 1, 1905 I promised Mother I would write in this journal daily so as not to “grow dull and stupid in this savage place.” I also promised that I would read—though the only books I have are her worn Bible and a copy of Mr. Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And the Twain book isn’t even mine. I found it in Old Joe Smiley’s stable when I was hiding from Leslie Granger and the passel of girls who follow her around complimenting her hair ribbons and treating her like some sort of queen. I also promised that I wouldn’t hide in the stable anymore. That I would say “please” and “thank you” and “ma’am” and “sir” religiously, that I would brush my hair without complaint and take a bath every Saturday—whether I needed one or not. I promised all of it. And I really did mean to abide by it. I would have promised her anything, even marriage to Old Joe Smiley himself, if I thought it would make a difference. But my promises didn’t matter one lick anyway. She died just the same. February 2, 1905 Broke my first promise today. Hid in the stable during dinner. I couldn’t stand listening to Leslie go on and on about some dress her mother ordered her from San Francisco. At least I read part of Huckleberry Finn while I was there. February 3, 1905 We moved to Goldfield exactly one month ago, today—so Papa could strike it rich in the mines. We are not yet rich.

Bailey Papa said Goldfield was a “paradise of riches” and that gold was so plentiful a man just had to bend over and pick it up. Papa made his share of promises too. A big house back East. Grand dresses and parties and friends with fine names and manners. But like I said the other day, promises don’t make a lick of difference. While Papa hunted for his paradise, Mother wrote letters to her people back East. In them she described “the dull dryness of the landscape, the soulless sound of the wind as it tore through our tent cabin, and the godless people who scurried between mining camp and dance hall.” Painted women, rough-spoken men. Even the dogs here are mangy and rude. She asked her family to pray for us, and I wonder if they did. Maybe the fever was God’s way of answering all those prayers. In any case, she was taken from this dusty place—carried away on the wings of a sickness even the old Shoshone women had no remedy for. February 4, 1905 I, Kit Donovan, turned thirteen today. A full-grown woman. Washed the linens and made a weak stew for supper. Papa is late and I am watching the few pieces of beef we have shrivel in a pot of potato-colored water. February 5, 1905 Turns out being a full-grown woman isn’t such a grand thing after all. I still wash and sweep, darn socks that are no better than scraps, collect eggs from the chicken, and cook. And I still have to go to school in a stinky old tent and try to make friends with classmates who laugh at my dinner and poke fun at my clothes. I’d much rather work in the stables or go prospecting on the back of a surly old burro. At least then life would hold some adventure.

Oregon Literary Fellowship Judges Pinckney Benedict grew up in rural West Virginia.

He has published four books of fiction; the most recent is Miracle Boy and Other Stories. His work has been published in Esquire, Zoetrope, O. Henry, Pushcart, Best New Stories from the South, and The Oxford Book of American Short Stories.

Brian Freeman is a San Francisco based playwright,

director, and performance artist. His play Civil Sex was produced by Berkeley Repertory Theater, the Public Theater, and Woolly Mammoth Theater in Washington, D.C. Awards include the CalArts Alpert Award and a New York Dance and Performance â&#x20AC;&#x153;Bessieâ&#x20AC;? award.

Wendy Lesser

is the founding and current editor of The Threepenny Review. She is also the author of nine books, including her first novel, The Pagoda in the Garden, and her latest nonfiction book, Music for Silenced Voices.

Phillis Levin

is the author of four volumes of poetry: Temples and Fields, The Afterimage, Mercury, and May Day. She is the editor of The Penguin Book of the Sonnet. Her poems have appeared in such journals as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Poetry, The Nation, and The Paris Review.

Michael Pearson is the author of six books, most

recently Innocents Abroad Too, a travel narrative about two voyages around the world. He is a professor of creative writing at Old Dominion University in Virginia.

Sheth’s novels have been translated in Kashmira

several languages and have received many awards. They all have been selected for “Choices,” Cooperative Children’s Book Center’s annual best-of-the-year list. Kashmira teaches at the Solstice MFA in Creative Writing Program at Pine Manor College in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts.

Staff & Board Literary Arts Staff Andrew Proctor, Executive Director Jenny Chu Lydah DeBin

Jennifer Fejta Mary Rechner Evan P. Schneider Mel Wells

Susan Denning

Literary Arts Board of Directors Susheela Jayapal, Chair

Amy Carlsen Kohnstamm

Betsy Amster

Frank Langfitt

Rick Comandich

Phillip Margolin

Alice Cuprill-Comas

John Meadows

Tracy Daugherty

Jessica Mozeico-Blair

Rebecca DeCesaro

James Reinhart

Robert Geddes

Barry Sanders

Theo Downes-Le Guin

Jacqueline Willingham

Pamela Smith Hill

Thomas Wood

Support Support for the Oregon Literary Fellowships is provided in part by:

AHA! Alling Henning Associates, Inc. Gwyneth Booth Nancy & Roderick Boutin Davis Wright Tremaine LLP Et Fille Wines

Janice & Steve Oliva The Oregon Community Foundation The Oregonian Pacific Northwest College of Art Betsy Priddy Advised Funds of the

Gale Family rust

Wichita Falls Area Community Foundation

Cecelia & Robert Huntington

Per & LIana Ramfjord

The Jackson Foundation

Tin House

Mandel Family Foundation

Writerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Dojo

Phillip Margolin

Wyss Foundation

Anne Mendel & Mark Henry